Exemplary Hipsters

Irony is usually thought of today as a defense mechanism for the socially insecure. But irony is really like the internet or money. It can be put to a broad range of purposes and play a broad range of roles in everyday life. The main feature of irony that makes us associate it so closely with hipsters is that lots of hipsters are essentially downwardly mobile young people who are putting themselves to some practical use, however small or marginal, instead of sitting around getting obese. Sure, lots of hipsters are partying themselves into a stupor while chasing pathetically semiotic fashion trends, but that’s true of millions who aren’t at all hipsters. Turns out, downward mobility is an extraordinarily narrow way of thinking about making radical choices about how to live and why. In some aspects of our lives, we should aim lower. In some, we may have to in order to aim far higher in some others. Survival is not necessarily a state of abjection or desperation. If we occur to ourselves accurately as resourceful, we may find ourselves in fairly high-stakes or high-risk situations with a sense of plenty that makes a mockery of binaries like upward-versus-downward mobility. Hipsters might be our best witnesses to how this works, and how it can work for all of us.

It’s a provocative statement and I’m not sure, even after a few days of mulling, what I think about it. Everything hinges on this account: “lots of hipsters are essentially downwardly mobile young people who are putting themselves to some practical use, however small or marginal, instead of sitting around getting obese.” I know a number of incredibly admirable young people who fit that description, who “put themselves to some practical use” by living among the poor, working part-time for two or three service organizations or Christian ministries. But those people don’t dress or act like hipsters, and they don’t live in or near desirable neighborhoods with funky coffee shops and artisanal bakeries. I don’t think they even drink PBR. And living that way for them is not a stepping-stone to a future in which their screenplay gets optioned or a gallery agrees to show their paintings.

James is exactly, profoundly right when he commends people who are willing to think, and more important act, outside the typical sliding scale of social and economic “mobility” — who can be resourceful and useful, and who experience plenty, while accepting economically marginal conditions. The question is whether this group overlaps with the category of “hipster,” and if it does, how and where.

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25 Responses to Exemplary Hipsters

This lifestyle is hardly even limited to young people. By your definition, wasn’t Dorothy Day a hipster?

As to your question, the Venn diagram likely has a big circle labeled “Downwardly Mobile” (or, perhaps, “Living Counter-Culturally”), and the “Hipster” is one of many, many circles that intersect with it. We as a culture just identify hipsters with this lifestyle because they’ve mastered social media in all its forms (it is their lingua franca, right?) and therefore steer its currents.

“And living that way for them is not a stepping-stone to a future in which their screenplay gets optioned or a gallery agrees to show their paintings.”

Is this even un-admirable in some way? Most of them won’t get the screenplay optioned. Most will work at it for a while, then there will be a pregnancy or a car payment and they’ll get a job at the insurance company. But living in semi-squalor while pursuing a career in academia or the arts is nothing new. I guess the complaint, and the charge of hipsterism, comes in when someone suspects that the semi-squalor is fake, or not high-stakes enough because so-and-so’s parents are cardiologists, or some such.

Seems that the real complaint against hipsters is that their efforts to camouflage themselves as poor makes it too hard for the rest of us to lambaste them as privileged. The other is that by turning semi-squalor into something fashionable, they are not suffering enough.

We’ve always had the “true” artist types and the strivers. And the tension between them. And the whole authenticity thing.

“Turns out, downward mobility is an extraordinarily narrow way of thinking about making radical choices about how to live and why. In some aspects of our lives, we should aim lower.”

My own obviously very naive understanding of how higher education is priced and paid for not withstanding, this elides somewhat with the comment I made about textbook pricing.

Not included in my recounting was the fact that when I transfered to the U of O I lived in my car for 4 of the 6 terms I attended (it was a VW camper, so not so bad) and the savings realized by not paying rent (and making very very full use of ALL of the campus facilities) allowed me to have a lavish materials budget.

Previously Alan and I have had some fairly candid conversations about the relative finances of Rancho Ryan vs. Che Jacobs, and I think it’s safe to say that Alan came somewhat surprised by the modest of our household’s yearly cash flow; the other side of that coin being that I have a certain amount of pride about how well we live on what is a fairly modest income for where we live.

But on James point about “aiming lower” I do think that we’re living in a time of such incredible material abundance that there’s a lot of freedom/value/opportunity/milage to be gained by strategically rejecting certain taken-for-granted expenses of the Sit-com vision of middle-classedness.

Aiming lower in one area can absolutely allow for aiming higher in another. Any life or household only has a finite amount of time, energy , money. How to deploy those resources in the hope of security and contentedness is a constant question. Previous generations puzzled over the cost (financial, spiritual, etc) of “keeping up with the Joneses.” There is also a cost that comes with not keeping up with the Jones.

The question is whether this group overlaps with the category of “hipster,” and if it does, how and where.

Alan, I’ve become more and more perplexed by how “hip” or “counter-cultural” and all their various cognates are used in common American parlance over the years, and I can’t help but suspect that root of that perplexity is our lack of commonly accepted understandings of how class interacts with identity. The very notion that someone “downwardly mobile” might be, intentionally or otherwise, constructing and affirming a “hip” cultural identity through their embrace of a DIY ethos and a rejection of the usual post-WWII capitalist markers of economic progress (moving to the suburbs, building up equity in one’s home, etc.) probably seems entirely plausible when explained in the context of Marx or Marcuse (or Thoreau, too; the anarchists have as much to offer here regarding class as the socialists do), but much less so when all we have available to us in our ordinary language is the rational individualism of the marketplace. I suspect that something like this has always haunted Rod Dreher’s “conservative” foodie project. Being someone who takes a lot of delight in organic and local and labor-intensive food makes him, at the same time, “downwardly mobile,” in that it meant getting back to the countryside and hanging out with subsistence farmers, and but also a “hip foodie elitist,” because it meant rejecting the cheap results of Big Agriculture and Wal-Mart. I can remember Jonah Goldberg on the NRO site accusing Rod and other Wendell Berry-readers of being quasi-Marxists way back when; I thought then, andstillthink, that Goldberg was more right than he knew, but he just didn’t understand his own accusation.

I will give an illusory ten dollars to anyone who can tell me who these hipsters are. Perhaps I am culturally isolated, but I don’t know what counts as hip anymore. I assume the hip drive a Prius, listen to Mumford and Sons, and have wine and cheese parties where they get into passionate discussions about the pressing need for “marriage equality.”

british medical journal, self-r(ev)ising above, is right – there are far more exemplars in heaven and earth, Ho Ratio and/or Virginia, than are dreamt of in the philosophy of hipsters in their turned-backward footie jammies scarfing in deadly earnest the PBJ sammiches to coat their stomachs for the evening’s ironic PBRs to come – see, as a locus classicus in these precincts, ah reckon, Subversive Orthodoxy: Outlaws, Revolutionaries, and Other Christians in Disguise by Robert Inchausti.

The portmanteau URL for Mahstah Poulos’s old so-named site reminds me – if I ever fall prey to the marriage delusion (i.e., that one woman differs from the next) and with that ring of hellfire I me wed, I must persuade my beloved Brunhilde to let me book our honeymoon in the Pomocos – even if it means, assuming I do as much solo drinking in our heart-shaped tub as I can under such a dispensation guarantee I would, I am pulled out of it by Housekeeping … pomocose after one too many ironic heirloom single-malt Scotches.

David Ryan: “But on James point about “aiming lower” I do think that we’re living in a time of such incredible material abundance that there’s a lot of freedom/value/opportunity/milage to be gained by strategically rejecting certain taken-for-granted expenses of the Sit-com vision of middle-classedness.”

Great point. In Bradley Anderson’s “Green Conservatism” post, I wondered aloud why more conservatives weren’t pushing anti-consumerism as an alternative to big-government environmental interventions. I guess I just wasn’t reading enough comments.

The funny thing about hipsters is they are ostensibly rebelling against social categories, but they’re actually creating a whole new set of categories. Or rather, a whole new designation of who’s in and who’s out. And conveniently, it’s always the culture of lower income people that hipsters turn up their noses at.

“Hipsters are a subculture of men and women typically in their 20′s and 30′s that value independent thinking, counter-culture, progressive politics, an appreciation of art and indie-rock, creativity, intelligence, and witty banter. ”

But if you really are into “progressive politics” chances are you don’t think of yourself as a hipster. For you “hipsters” would be uninvolved ironists who don’t care about larger issues.

Of course, for the rest of us, if you’re involved with progressive politics, indie-rock, and “witty banter” and think yourself especially creative and intelligent, you may well be a hipster.

We — the rest of us — often consider devoted followers of fashion as “hipsters,” but neither the politically committed nor the cynical, detached ironists would consider themselves to be part of consumer culture.

“I assume the hip drive a Prius, listen to Mumford and Sons, and have wine and cheese parties where they get into passionate discussions about the pressing need for “marriage equality.””

That’s not a hipster. That’s whatever they call a yuppie now.

A hipster drives a hearse. And i can’t tell you what band they listen to. because if it’s someone you and I know about, it’s not who hipsters listen to anymore. If they see you or I refering to those bands, they will stop listening to them immediately.

I think the problem of defining a hipster is much like defining the someone as confident as opposed to arrogant. It depends on your opinion of the person’s actual ability/intention, not on their actions.

I once presented a paper at the Faulkner & Yoknapatawpha Conference in Oxford, MS. I was one of the youngest people there (27, then), and the only one I recall wearing jeans for most of the events. I was also follicly echoing Barry Gibb at his most leonine in those days. I had a wonderful time and met marvelous people, one of whom was a charming female professor from Barcelona. We bonded over coffee the first morning and stuck together over the course of the next three days. On our way to the airport, one of the other presenters in the van with us (a professor from Arkansas) made reference to “hipsters.” My Spanish companion looked confused and said, “Heep-sters? What are heep-sters?” Without missing a beat, the Razorback pointed at me and said “Him.”

The moral of this story is this: I live in LA, and even then, when I was younger and more plugged in to the music scene down here, I stuck out like a sore thumb at parties in Silver Lake, Echo Park, and all the other little hipster shires. I was a grad student, not someone cool, and certainly not someone HIP. I wore jeans because California culture is really casual, even when it’s formal, and my hair was, well… my hair, and I figured I might as well flaunt it while I got it. But to this woman from Arkansas (whose work and company I also enjoyed at the conference), I was Exhibit A of heep-sterdom. This is not to say there aren’t real hipsters in Fayetteville (there are), just that it’s near impossible to know what a hipster actually is to anyone else. You might even be one yourself!

Backwards Daniel/Classifieds‘ priceless story about his resemblance, in the mane, to the pre-hipster-hopper artist The Notorious B.G. , thence to charming Barcelonan restyling as a “heep-ster”, suggests in that latter usage either a subculture among Dickens fans who think themselves the very picture of ironist subversion when affecting frock-coated servility – or another among those following the so-named band on tour after the otherwise … deathless precedent of the Deadhead.

Interesting. I think many 20-, 30-somethings today may be incorrectly classified by others as hipsters because they consciously decide not to embrace the materialism of the larger culture. Many of these young see the near requirement of car-ownership, for instance, as expensive, undesirable, and environmentally-suspect. Are they downwardly mobile? Perhaps, but I think we are in a downwardly mobile age, a time of contraction. The cheap oil age—and all that went with it— is pretty much over folks. The youngsters ‘get it’.
The key thing about hipsters is that they possess a knowledge and appreciation of things—typically artistic things—that are under the radar of the masses, or not appreciated by them. That is what makes a hipster hip.

On hipsters and unhipsters, from a 70 year old observer of my kids and the East Bay counterculture, I’ll try to clear up some confusion.

Hipsters don’t drive Prius, and probably not a hearse either. They likely drive a bicycle, and, like one confirmed hipster I know, they’ll take public transport to work so they can afford to rebuild the 30 year old Austin Bugeye Sprite that’s in a girlfriend’s garage.

Hipsters only drink PBR after they’ve quaffed a pint or two of very hoppy microbrew. The PBR gives more bang for the buck, but first one needs to support the independent brewers.

Hipsters don’t give a rats ass what we think, because we are all strivers after a lifestyle that means nothing to them. We don’t get it. They are redefining aspirations, IMHO.

It is interesting to see what’s happening in Oakland, across the bridge from San Francisco. Lots of really good, really small restaurants, some funky clubs, a barber shop that gives you a tot of small-still bourbon with your haircut, some medicinal weed, and a Tshirt that says:

“if hipsterism/hipsters are bad, or acting like one is bad, what is the “right” way to be or act?”

That’s a really good question. I think it starts with empathy, or with not taking oneself too seriously and not judging the life choices of others too harshly. I say that, of course, knowing that I am as judgmental a person as anyone. We’re all cultural hypocrites to a certain extent. Of course, part of the reason why I’m so judgmental of hipsters is because I share some of the same cultural and political DNA with them. White liberals are usually the harshest bashers of hipsters. A typical day for us can involve spotting and laughing at a hipster downtown, then in the next breath shaking our heads at a Republican couple driving an SUV. We’re a pretty judgmental bunch. Then again, so are conservatives.

In defense of the hipsters, those neighborhoods are desirable and populated with funky coffee shops and artisinal bakeries precisely because the hipsters are there. The hipsters are opening the coffee shops and bakeries, which I think constitutes “practical use.”

I think there are some great points here. The association with downward mobility and hipsters is perhaps missing the wider picture . Downward mobility is just another expression for frugal living and many people in the west are catching on. Software is making frugality convenient. For example, folk living in cities using public transport or a bicycle and then renting a car when needed is becoming much more common – smartphone apps are making it convenient to do so. Aiming lower, as described, might even challenge the notion of owning consumer goods itself, when the option to rent televisions, cameras, computers and cars will be too cheap and convenient to pass on..allowing us to have only what we need when we need it at a better price than having houses full of stuff.

I think the crash of 2008 and the general economic malaise of the past many years (a time that has been crucial in the formation of a generation’s worldview and approach to life) should be taken into account when looking at how people in their 20s and early 30s live today.